ABSTRACT
This book seeks to explore the nature and scope of the growing relationship between the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the Middle East1 from 19942 onwards. This evolving relationship has been affected and characterised by complexity, with each aspect facing its own internal and external challenges. Moreover, the international arena, ever shifting and changing, has had its own impact on the pace and depth of this growing relationship. With the end of Cold War, NATO embarked on an enormous and ongoing transformation process with a view to re-identifying its main tasks, revising its long-standing policies and developing tools to address its peripheries, especially those of strategic importance. As part of this transformation process, NATO recognised the high importance of the Middle East region, consequently developing policies aimed at handling its security concerns there. In doing so, NATO launched a dialogue initiative with select South Mediterranean countries3 at the 1994 Brussels Summit. The Mediterranean Dialogue (MD) initiative constitutes phase one in the transformation of NATO’s Middle Eastern policy and has been gradually developed thereafter. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, NATO decided to widen the scope and extent of this dialogue in order to instil a sense of partnership with MD participants. Moreover, at the 2004 Istanbul Summit, NATO launched another initiative, in similar vein, aimed at forging security ties with Arab Gulf countries.4 This initiative is known as the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI). The two parallel tracks of MD and ICI constitute the main vehicle for reviewing and extending NATO’s role in the Middle East. These two initiatives, as explained in this book, aim at fostering new patterns of cooperation with select Middle Eastern countries. They are mainly focused on ‘soft’ security issues, such as mechanisms of consultation, exchange of expertise and military exercises. But NATO has also started to play a direct, if supporting, role in select Middle Eastern crises, such as Iraq and Darfur. In order to evaluate and identify the parameters of the new NATO-Middle East relationship, this book reviews, outlines and analyses the internal and external challenges this relationship faces. Clearly, NATO and the Middle East are not approaching one another in a political and geostrategic vacuum; both fall under the shadow of US influence. Thus, it is difficult to separate this relationship from
the broader global context, including first and foremost the huge impact of the United States on both NATO and the Middle East. Indeed, it could be argued that understanding the Middle East region is not possible without relating it to – or in some way referring to – the role of the United States and the nature of its policies, especially after the events of 11 September 2001. Similarly, one cannot shed light on NATO’s strategy or orientation towards the Middle East without taking into account the prominent role of the US in determining the pace and extent of the North Atlantic Alliance’s transformation process since the end of the Cold War, as well as the scope of its Middle Eastern policy. Against such a background, this book mainly concentrates on the impact of the events of 9/11 on the development and evolution of NATO’s policies towards the region. The aim is to ascertain whether or not NATO has increased and enhanced its role in the Middle East region in an effective manner, in response to the new challenges that have emerged in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. This book also seeks to ascertain whether or not the United States has used NATO as a vehicle for its foreign policy in the Middle East region. The scope of this book – the relationship between NATO and the Middle East – has required and necessitated that the ‘timeframe’ under examination extend from the 1994 Brussels Summit, in which NATO embarked on its Middle Eastern policy review, to the 2006 Riga Summit that launched NATO’s most recent proposals with respect to its growing role in the Middle East region.
